administrators

Ask anyone professing the humanities today and you come to understand that a medieval dimness looms. If this is the end-times for the ice sheets at our poles — and it is — many of us also understand that the melt can be found closer to home, in the elimination of language and classics departments, for instance, and in the philistinism represented by governors such as Rick Scott of Florida and Patrick McCrory of North Carolina, who apparently see in the humanities a waste of time and taxpayer subsidies. In the name of efficiency and job creation, according to their logic, taxpayers can no longer afford to support bleary-eyed poets, Latin history radicals, and brie-nibbling Francophiles.

That there is a general and widespread acceptance in the United States that what is good for corporate America is good for the country is perhaps inarguable, and this is why men like Governors Scott and McCrory are dangerous. They merely invoke a longstanding and not-so-ugly stereotype: the pointy-headed humanist whose work, if you can call it that, is irrelevant. Among the many easy targets, English departments and their ilk are convenient and mostly defenseless. Few will rise to rush the barricades with us, least of all the hard-headed realists who understand the difficulties of running a business, which is what the university is, anyway.

I wish, therefore, to propose a solution that will save money, save the humanities, and perhaps make the world a better place: Close the business schools.

The Market Argument

We are told that something called “the market” is responsible for the great disparities in pay between humanities professors and business professors. To a humanist, however, this market is the great mystifier; we find no evidence of an “invisible hand” that magically allocates resources within the university. The market argument for pay differentials between business professors and historians (average pay in 2014 for full professors at all institutions: $123,233 and $86,636, respectively, a difference of almost 30 percent; average at research institutions is $160,705 and $102,981, a difference of 36 percent), for instance, fails to convince that a market is operating. This is because administrators and trustees who set salaries based upon what the market can bear, or what it calls for, or what it demands, are actually subsidizing those of us who are who are manifestly out of the market.

Your average finance professor, for instance, is not a part of this market; indeed, she is a member of the artificial market created by colleges and universities themselves, the same institutions that tout the importance of critical thinking and of creating the well-rounded individual whose liberal arts study will ostensibly make her into a productive member of our democracy. But the administrators who buy the argument that the market allocates upward of 20, 30, or 40 percent more for the business professor than it does her colleague in the humanities have failed to be the example they tout: they are not thinking.

The higher education market for business professors and legal scholars, for instance, is one in which the professor is paid as if she took her services and sold them on what is commonly call the market. Which is where she, and her talents, manifestly are not. She is here, in the building next to ours, teaching our students and doing the same work we are. If my daughter cuts our lawn, she does not get paid as if she were cutting the neighbor’s lawn.

The business professor has sacrificed the blandishments of the other market for that of the university, where she can work softer hours, have her December/January vacation, go to London during the summer on a fellowship or university grant, and generally live something approaching the good life — which is what being employed by a college or university allows the lucky who earn tenure. She avoids the other market — eschews the long hours in the office, the demands of travel, the oppressive corporate state — so that she can pick up her kids from school on occasion, sleep in on a Saturday, and turn off her smartphone. She may be part of a machine, but it is a university machine, and as machines go she could do worse. This “market” is better than the other one.

But does she bring more value to the university? Does she generate more student hours? These are questions that administrators and business professors do not ask. Why? Because they wouldn’t like the answers. They would find that she is an expensive acquisition. Unless she is one of the Wharton superstars and appears on CNN Money and is quoted in The Wall Street Journal, there’s a good chance that the university isn’t getting its money’s worth.

The Moral Argument

There is another argument for wishing our business professor adieu. She is ostensibly training the next crop of financiers and M.B.A.s whose machinations have arguably had no salutary effects on this democracy. I understand that I am casting a wide net here, grouping the good with the bad, blaming the recent implosion of the world economy on business schools. One could, perhaps, lay equal blame on the mathematicians and quantitative analysts who created the derivative algorithms and mortgage packages that even the M.B.A.s themselves don’t understand, though there’s a good chance that business school graduates hired these alpha number crunchers.

Our investment bankers and their ilk will have to take the fall because, well, they should have known better. If only because, at bottom, they are responsible — with their easy cash and credit, their drive-through mortgages, and, worst of all, their betting against the very system they knew was hopelessly constructed. And they were trained at our universities, many of them, probably at our best universities, the Harvards and Princetons and Dartmouths, where — it is increasingly apparent — the brightest students go to learn how to destroy the world.

I am not arguing that students shouldn’t take classes in accounting, marketing, and economics. An understanding of these subjects holds value. They are honorable subjects often horribly applied. In the wrong hands they become tools less of enlightenment and liberation than ruthless self-interest. And when you have groups of like-minded economic pirates banding together in the name of self-interest, they form a corporation, that is, a person. That person, it is now apparent, cannot be relied upon to do the right thing; that person cannot be held accountable.

It’s not as if this is news. Over 150 years ago, Charles Dickens saw this problem, and he wrote A Christmas Carol to address it. The hero of Dickens’s novella is Jacob Marley, who returns from the grave to warn his tightfisted partner Ebenezer Scrooge that he might want to change his ways. When Scrooge tells Marley that he was always a “good man of business,” Marley brings down the thunder: “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”

In closing the business schools, may the former professors of finance bring to the market a more human side (or, apropos of Dickens, a more ghostly side). Whether or not they do, though, closing the business schools is a necessary first step in righting the social and economic injustices perpetuated not by capitalism but by those who have used it to rend the very social fabric that nourishes them. By planting the seeds of corporate and financial tyranny, our business schools, operating as so many of them do in collusion with a too-big-to-fail mentality, have become the enemy of democracy. They must be closed, since, as Jacob Marley reminds us, we all live in the business world.

II. Save the Humanities

Closing the business schools will allow us to turn our attention more fully to the state of the humanities and their apparent demise. The 2013 report released by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which asserts that “the humanities and social sciences are not merely elective, nor are they elite or elitist. They go beyond the immediate and instrumental to help us understand the past and the future.” As if that’s going to sell.

In the wake of the academy’s report, The New York Times dutifully ran three columns on the humanities — by David Brooks, Verlyn Klinkeborg, and Stanley Fish — which dove into the wreck and surveyed the damage in fairly predictable ways (excepting Fish, whose unpredictability is predictable). Brooks remembers when they used to teach Seneca and Catullus, and Klinkeborg looks back on the good old days when everyone treasured literature and literary study. Those days are gone, he argues, because “the humanities often do a bad job of teaching the humanities,” and because “writing well used to be a fundamental principle of the humanities,” though it apparently is not anymore. Why writing well isn’t a fundamental principle of life is perhaps a better question.

We might therefore ask: Aside from the typical obeisance to something called “critical thinking,” what are the humanities supposed to do?

I propose that one of the beauties of the liberal arts degree is that it is meant to do nothing. I would like to think, therefore, that the typical humanities major reads because she is interested in knowledge for purposes outside of the pervasive instrumentalism now fouling higher education. She does not read philosophy because she wants, necessarily, to become a philosopher; she does not read poetry to become a poet, though she may dream of it; she does not study art history, usually, to become an art historian, though she may one day take this road.

She may be in the minority, but she studies these subjects because of the pleasure it gives her. Reading literature, or studying philosophy, or viewing art, or watching films — and thinking about them — are pleasurable things. What a delight to subsidize something that gives her immediate and future joy instead of spending capital on a course of study that might someday allow her to make more money so that she can do the things she wants to do at some distant time. Henry David Thoreau said it best: “This spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up garret at once.” If you want to be a poet, be done with it.

Does she suffer for this pleasure?

It is an unfortunate fact of our political and cultural economy that she probably does. Her parents wonder helplessly what she is up to and they threaten to cut off her tuition unless she comes to her senses. The governor and legislature of her state tell her that she is wasting her time and that she is unemployable. She goes to her advisers, who, if they are in the humanities, tell her that the companies her parents revere love to hire our kind, that we know how to think critically and write clearly and solve problems.

And it isn’t that they are lying, exactly (except to themselves). They simply aren’t telling her the whole truth: that she will almost surely never have the kind of financial success that her peers in business or engineering or medicine will have; that she will have enormous regrets barely ameliorated by the thought that she carries the fire; that the digital humanities will not save her, either, though they may help make her life slightly more interesting.

It is with this problem in mind that I argue for a vision of the university as a place where the humanities are more than tolerated, where they are celebrated as intrinsic to something other than vocationalism, as a place in which the ideology that inheres to the industrial model in all things can and ought to be dismantled and its various parts put back together into something resembling a university and not a factory floor.

Instead of making the case that the humanities gives students the skills to “succeed in a rapidly changing world,” I want to invoke the wisdom of Walt Whitman, one of the great philosophers of seeming inactivity, who wrote: “I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.”

What does it mean to loafe? Whitman is reclining and relaxing, but he is also active: he “invites” his soul and “observes” the world around him. This conjunction of observation and contemplation with an invitation to the soul is the key here; using our time, energy, and intellectual faculties to attend to our world is the root of successful living. A world of contemplative loafers is one that can potentially make clear-eyed moral and ethical judgments of the sort that we need, judgments that deny the conflation of economic value with other notions of value.

Whitman would rather hang out with the men who brought in the catch than listen to the disputations of science or catch the fish himself: “You should have been with us that day round the chowder-kettle.” While I am not necessarily advocating a life of sloth, I’m not arguing against it, either. I respect the art of study for its own sake and revere the thinker who does nothing worthwhile, if by worthwhile we mean something like growing the economy. Making a living rather than living is the sign of desperation.

William Major is professor of English at Hillyer College of the University of Hartford. He is author of Grounded Vision: New Agrarianism and the Academy (University of Alabama Press, 2011).

The director of the Ohio State University marching band, who helped the band become YouTube sensations last year with complex, iPad-enhanced halftime shows, was fired Thursday following allegations that he ignored a longstanding culture of sexual harassment and hazing within the band.

Jonathan Waters has been the band's director since 2012, but has served in other roles with the band for a decade. He was fired following a two-month investigation by the university's office of compliance.

"[The investigation] found, among other things, very serious cultural issues and an environment conducive to sexual harassment with the band, creating a hostile environment for students," Michael Drake, the university's president, said in a video statement. "I was profoundly disappointed to learn this. We can -- and according to our values and Title IX we must -- do better. Even one incident of harassment or hazing or assault is one too many."

The alleged behavior included an annual student-led practice where students marched in their underwear at midnight, a tradition of assigning sexually explicit nicknames to rookie band members, and a raunchy unofficial songbook. The Columbus Dispatch has the full report here.

Drake said Betty Montgomery, Ohio's former attorney general, will lead an independent task force further investigating the report.

Non-tenure-track faculty members at Antioch University’s Seattle campus voted overwhelmingly in favor of forming a union affiliated with the Service Employees International Union, they announced Wednesday. The news came on the heels of decisive defeat of a proposed SEIU union at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis earlier this week. The official count at Antioch was 84 adjuncts in favor and 14 opposed.

Antioch is the third university to hold SEIU adjunct union elections in Washington State, after Pacific Lutheran University and Seattle University (both of which have challenged adjuncts’ right to form a union, based on the colleges’ religious identities). Antioch’s administration has not challenged the union bid there, but Chancellor Felice Nudelman has publicly expressed concern about how a union will affect the university’s ability to work as partners with the faculty.

Nudelman reiterated that sentiment in a statement Wednesday, saying “Antioch has and does operate in a socially and economically just manner without interposing a third party between it and its employees. It is our sincere hope that the university’s ability to solve problems creatively and collaboratively is not diminished by the formation of this union. To that end, we will now begin the process to meet and bargain in good faith with our union colleagues over the terms of a contract.”

In Texas, a House of Representatives panel has found grounds for impeaching a regent of the University of Texas system. The regent, a gubernatorial appointee, has asked for an enormous amount of material related to the performance of the president of UT-Austin — some people say several hundred thousand pages' worth, often through open-records requests. He believes it is necessary to cull this information, but his critics characterize his requests as a witch hunt.

At the College of Charleston, board members selected as the next president a candidate who did not emerge from the formal search process. He is a politician whose name was advanced by the state legislature and who has never worked in higher education, prompting student and faculty protests. While we wish this new president success, the willingness of policy makers to usurp the college’s board raises important issues about governance.

It’s difficult to ignore these incidents and the other less-than-effective work occurring in some of the boardrooms of our colleges and universities. Such behavior shines a spotlight on America’s distinct form of higher education board governance: voluntary, citizen boards that oversee the work of colleges and universities. And it raises a fundamental question: Just how far does the authority of any one board member extend?

The 50,000 men and women who serve as board members are the public’s closest connection to our country’s colleges and universities — institutions that hold the key to the future not only of the students who attend them, but also of the entire nation. Each member must have the confidence that he or she can inquire about information that is relevant to the board’s policy considerations. At the same time, there are limits. Individual members of governing boards hold no specific or individual authority; it is the board, as the fiduciary body, that holds and implements its legal authority. It’s a bit of a balancing act.

The challenges of that balancing act are especially apparent in the case of the Texas regent. The situation raises a number of difficult yet important questions:

How much information sought by one board member is appropriate in order to inform decision-making and oversight?

When does the demand for information border on the excessive or reach the point of diminishing returns?

Is it effective stewardship to search until something is found, or instead to ask pithy and relevant questions?

Is there a risk of substituting political considerations for sound oversight?

And, most important, does such an effort actually serve the public’s interest? Or does it smack, on some level, of an individual’s personal agenda — one that misses the point of board service and stewardship? And, then, who is to monitor such behavior?

Other recent incidents of trustees possibly, if not probably, overreaching their authority raise similar questions, and their board colleagues should address them. Higher education is facing enormous challenges; its governing bodies must find ways to raise their overall performance and to focus on the ever-more-uncertain future of higher ed.

Going against the norm and being the sole voice for what is right in many ways defines who we are as a nation. And yet, board governance is a team sport, and fiduciary principles require a corporate approach. It’s not that individual trustees shouldn’t raise difficult issues, but the genesis of those issues should be considered and discussed. When board members leverage their role to advance a point of view — perhaps even representing the interests of others, including policy makers who are not board members — it is a violation of the independence so necessary to board service and calls into question our model of governance.

At the same time, the monitoring of board-member performance belongs in the boardroom. Governing boards hold the ultimate authority to establish policies for the institutions they oversee. While states may allow for removal of a board member of a public institution governing body by the appointing authority, the best oversight of board-member behavior comes from peers who should also be committed to the fiduciary principles that define such service.

Of course, the challenge is to be certain that boards recognize what it means to be a fiduciary and the standards expected of the board (and its members) to uphold the interests of the institutions they oversee. Boards must protect their independence and act on behalf of broader interests than just those that appoint them. We can’t afford to let boards fall short on their self-policing.

The future of the country, dependent in so many ways on the success of our colleges and universities, requires the oversight of governing boards whose members are fully aware of the scope of their fiduciary responsibilities. Serving the country’s higher education sector as a trustee, at either a public or private institution, is important and rewarding, and it is an honor. But those of us who have this honor must understand both the breadth and limits of our authority and influence.

Richard D. Legon is president of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges.

The board of Howard University has tapped the interim president, Wayne A.I. Frederick, to take on the position on a permanent basis. Frederick holds three degrees from Howard. He was 16 when he first enrolled, traveling from his native Trinidad, seeking a career as a physician. At Howard, Frederick taught in the medical school and was a surgeon at the hospital before rising through the ranks of academic administration. The historically black university has struggled financially in recent years. In an October interview with The Washington Post, Frederick expressed confidence that the university was working through its financial difficulties.